What it comes down to is that it’s easy to click like on a Facebook status update or retweet a post with a political view you support. Those clicks may have subtle, long-term effects on changing ideas, much in the same way a bumper sticker would. But social media has not proven itself to be a tool of immediate and profound social change – even in the high profile cases where proponents of the new technology insist that it has been.

Both men encountered the same number of people. Both men covered roughly the same number of miles in the same amount of time. But why, nearly 240 years later, do we remember Paul Revere and not William Dawes? The answer is related to their place in the social network.

A lecture from the online version of my “Cyberculture and Digital Media” course, which should be interesting for anyone who likes to, or feels they should, think about the “bigger picture” of social media.